Day four of my seven favourite nature-related books of 2012. If you've missed the first three, you can catch up with them here (day 1; day 2; day 3). Each book is presented alongside a 'perfect partner', so please scroll right down the page to read both.
And since you'll be thinking about Christmas presents, don't forget that you can order a copy of my colourful British Wildlife calendar here.
As before - direct links are given to online bookstores, but please don't forget to support your local, independent bookshop - they need you this Christmas!
As before - direct links are given to online bookstores, but please don't forget to support your local, independent bookshop - they need you this Christmas!
Day 4 - Book of the Day
As You Like It (Norton Critical Editions)
William Shakespeare (edited by Leah S. Marcus)
Are you completely mad?! (Probably). Shakespeare?!? (Please,
call me Kris). I thought you said all these books were published in 2012! And you said they were all nature related!
...I did. Let me explain:
While Shakespeare’s play may be a classic of 17th century drama, this Norton edition is new as of 2012. I’m a big fan of Norton books, which reproduce not
only a classic literary text with a wealth of interesting annotations, but also
provide an additional anthology of literature, historical and modern to set a
context for the main work, all in one volume.
And I’ve spent much of this year with my nose in this
book. Shakespeare’s play is a classic of
Pastoral literature (although the debate still rages as to whether he was
composing true pastoral, or merely parodying the style as anti-pastoral),
asking many questions about the interaction between man and the natural world;
is life in a civilised society in the city (or in the court) really an
improvement over the simple life lived foraging in the woods; does man have the
right to leave the city and trespass upon the home of wild animals, killing
them for food? Do animals have consciousness that makes them prone to suffering
in a way we humans might understand.
Shakespeare balances the dialogues so skilfully that the play provides a
debating ground for the characters (and audience) without ever settling the
debates one way or the other. Meanwhile, this book also presents a great many additional articles and chapters for the modern reader to consider on the subject of man’s relationship with nature.
Alongside the play, the editor has reproduced a wide range
of historical and modern articles which set the context for the debate and show
its continuation into the modern age.
Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde,
on which Shakespeare based his play, is printed here and can be read alongside
the play, but there is much else to deepen the readers involvement in the
debates. Among the highlights for me are
George Gascoygne’s poem of 1611, ‘The Woeful Words of the Hart to the Hunter’,
a four-page anthropomorphic plea (in the words of a deer) which appeals to the
hunter for understanding of the pain and suffering of hunted beasts and
Montaigne’s classic text on the place of humans in relation to animals (‘When I
am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with
me than I have in gaming with her’). More modern extracts include those by
Keith Thomas on ‘Boundaries between Animal and Human’ (taken from his great
book Man and the Natural World: Changing
Attitudes in England 1500-1800, a brilliant book worth a read in full), and
Gabriel Egan’s essay ‘Food and Biological nature in As You Like It’, from Green
Shakespeare: from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. There are plenty more.
For those readers interested in the historical
considerations of man’s place in nature, his relationship with animals, and the
nature (and unnaturalness) of civilisation, this is an enlightening anthology
that will have pride of place on the shelf to be brought down for many readings.
Perfect Partner
Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (Norton Critical Editions)
Henry David Thoreau (edited by William Rossi)
Published by W. W. Norton and Company, 2008
Available from Amazon and Waterstones
Those wanting to get their fill of Shakespeare this
Christmas won’t be surprised to learn that I considered making Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale the (somewhat
predictable) partner of As You Like It. Nevertheless, Norton has not yet published an
‘anthologised’ edition of the play (although the Arden Shakespeare edition does
contain useful discussions of ‘Pastorals’ and ‘Nature and Art’ within the
lengthy introduction which I recommend for general interest).
Nevertheless, the chosen partner today is Norton’s edition
of Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden,
an account of the author’s experiment over the course of three years to live a
life in an area of Massachusetts woodland in the 1840s. Alongside Thoreau’s great rumination on the
burdens of 19th civilised life, this volume also contains his
personal journal from the Walden years, as well as many other great texts,
including ‘Walking’, ‘Wild Apples’, and ‘Civil Disobedience’.
At almost 700 pages, this is quite a sizable volume for
discovering Thoreau for the first time, and much as I love it, I still seek
refuge in my well-thumbed Oxford edition of Walden
(no extras here, except for the editor's introduction and some very good endnotes), a much more portable volume for general reading and
travelling with (my copy also happens to contain several years’ worth of my own loving
annotations and underlinings which make it irreplaceable, and of the several copies I own, is still the first edition I turn to for Walden itself).
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